Teacher Appreciation Sale and a FREEBIE!

Happy Teacher Appreciation Day! I hope you felt appreciated for all the incredible work you do! I, for one, took advantage of free Chick-fil-a with a teacher's ID for dinner tonight. If only it could be like that all the time... ha!

I know I've got a bunch of stuff on my wishlist that I want to get, especially in preparation for the beginning of the school year since I'll actually have a moment to put it all together during the summertime!

Everything in my TPT shop is on sale for 20% off... and you can get an extra 8% off from TPT using the code TAD13! Here are a few of my most popular products that you can feel free to check out. Click on any of the pictures below to go directly to the product in my store!

My most popular item in my shop is Shapes Galore for the Common Core!, a 2D/3D shapes unit.

I also have a Plants and Living Things Observation Journal available... my neighbor teacher is currently using this with her kiddos and she says they are loving it! My students did, too, when we were busy planting our bean seeds!

My latest product is a decomposing numbers 3-9 activity pack, How Many Ways? I tested this pack out with my kiddos before putting it in my store and the counter activities helped them understand the concept so well!

Because it is Teacher Appreciation Day, I wanted to share something with you to let you know how much I appreciate YOU! During our farm unit, we read the cutest book, Hogwash! by Karma Wilson. 

The book is so funny! I was fortunate enough to get it as a gift from one of my students at our last book fair and I'm so glad! Anywho, I made a little response sheet to go with the story where the students had to write about what happened in the beginning, middle, and end in their own words to retell the story. It's yours by clicking on the picture below! Enjoy!

What we're up to this week: Literacy Centers edition with a FREEBIE!

Woah, two updates in one week! This is unheard of! I am on a roll, let me tell you. :) I'm really trying to be more dedicated at updating when I have the time and I really want to start sharing more freebies with you all! I posted a farm-themed rhyming picture sort in my last post if you want to go download.

Today, I thought I'd share a little bit about the literacy centers my students are participating in this week.  My kids always love sentence stem activities, so I try and put some of those in my centers whenever I can. It's a great way for the kids to practice their fluency skills, sight words, and reading and tracking print. And since we always make a response sheet for these activities, they get a little writing in, too! Since we are working on our farm theme at the moment, the sentence stem for this week is "A ____________ lives on the farm." I put the sentence stem at the top of the pocket chart and then I included words and pictures of various farm animals. One student chooses a word, another student holds the pointer, and they all choral read together. After each sentence is made and read, they go back to their response sheet to fill out the sentence they created; then once everyone has completed that, they switch jobs and create a new sentence. Don't mind my awful illustrations... ha!

Example of the response sheet:

Our latest word family had words ending in -x, so I put together a little activity sheet called "X Marks the Spot". Using a bingo dobber, the students have to find all the words ending in X. The second half of the sheet, called "Read and Illustrate", has the students do just that! They have to read the second and draw a picture to show meaning. Of course each sentence has words ending in X as well!

Click the picture below to download this activity for FREE! {Note: This is made on 11x17 paper!}

Our third station of the week is an ending sound picture sort. My kids can identify beginning sounds like the back of their hand, but sometimes get tripped up on identifying the ending sounds! I made this little picture sort to help them practice and they have done wonderfully so far! On my picture sorts, I always like to have them write the word to match the picture to work on their phonemic awareness and decoding skills. This friend is really strong in his "sound-it-out" skills. :)

The rest of my centers include a farm book craftivity (pictures to come when it is all complete) and two centers that remain the same EVERY week - computers and listening center.

This year, more than ever, my students seem to complete their work in record time and are constantly asking me, "What can I do now that I'm done?" To try and alleviate hearing it 1230275 times a day, I try to include some fast finisher activities that they can choose once they are done. The four fast finishers I'm using this week are:

1. Blast Off! Sight word dice game (Made by the wonderful Cara Carroll!)

2. Sight Word Sentence white board activities (From Lakeshore)

3. Scholastic "Let's Find Out!" Magazine (This week, a belated Dr. Seuss edition!)

4. "Sounds in the Clouds" CVC beginning and ending word building (Which can be found in my weather unit on TPT... click here to check it out: Oh the Weather Outside... {Weather Activities for Math, Literacy, and More!})

My students look forward to centers so much and literally cheer when I tell them it's time for them to begin! It's one of my favorite times of the day!

Farm activities, a FREEBIE, and a little plural noun fun!

We are closing up the final week of our farm theme and we've got tons of fun stuff going on! Whenever the final week of our reading theme rolls around (we use Houghton Mifflin), we usually use that time to read supplemental fiction and non-fiction stories that are not included in the reading series. Some of the stories we will be reading this week include Rosie's Walk, Click Clack Moo Cows That Type, and The Little Red Hen. I'll share more about the activities we'll be completing with those books later on in the week!

We began to create our farm book craftivity - a teacher on my team came up with this rhyming book as a way to describe things found on the farm! Here's a sneak peek of the front cover the kids made - I'll share the entire book when it's all complete! It always turns out so cute!

Today I re-introduced plural nouns (we had learned a bit about word endings earlier in the year). My kids love watching videos, singing songs, and dancing to their learning, so I showed this video from an amazing website, havefunteaching.com! It's completely free!

We followed it up with a little plural noun video from another favorite site, Brainpop Jr. We are lucky enough to have a subscription to that website and my kids love learning from Moby and Annie! After reviewing with the videos, we did a little activity where the kids had to change farm animal names from the singular to the plural version of the word. They were pointing out plural names for the rest of the day! Love when they apply their learning on their own!

Last week we were reviewing rhyming words, so I made up a little farm animal rhyming word picture sort. You can download it for FREE by clicking on the picture below!